Chongqing aims to build biggest IT manufacturing base in Asia

Models at an auto exhibition in Chongqing. As part of Chongqing's development roadmap the city plans to quadruple its industrial output to around 4 trillion yuan in the next 10 years, driven by pillar industries including automobiles. (Zhang Luqiao / for China Daily)

BEIJING, July 9 (Xinhuanet) -- Chongqing, the populous economic hub in southwestern China, never seems to be out of the limelight. After launching a sweeping crackdown on violent gangs last year, the city is now setting its sights on building Asia's largest manufacturing base for information technology (IT) products.

In an interview with China Daily, Chongqing Mayor Huang Qifan expressed his confidence on the prospects for the IT industry, supported by fast-growing demand for computer and communication facilities, even though the overall global output of the IT industry has shrunk some 40 percent amid the global financial crisis.

"Partnering with several big names in IT, such as Hewlett-Packard (HP) and CISCO, Chongqing will soon have an IT industrial cluster with an annual industrial output of some 400 billion yuan ($59 billion)," Huang said on the sidelines of the World Cities Summit in Singapore.

US computer maker HP and world-leading communication technology provider CISCO have established new manufacturing bases in Chongqing, aiming to tap the country's central and western regions.

The HP factory will produce 5 million computers this year and 40 million by 2012, according to Huang.

The IT industrial cluster is only part of the local authorities' effort to build Chongqing, China's largest municipality, into an economic powerhouse in the country's western hinterland.

The city won government approval last month to set up a 1,200 square kilometer special economic zone - Liangjiang New Area, the nation's third of its kind after Shanghai Pudong and Tianjin Binhai.